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It’s Time to Stop Labeling Experiences as ‘Good’ Or ‘Bad’

You might be missing out on another perspective

Max Phillips
Forge
3 min readAug 4, 2021

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Photo: Malte Mueller/Getty Images

The Office’s Dwight Schrute once said: “Not everything’s a lesson, Ryan. Sometimes you just fail.”

Failure doesn’t need to be a bad or a good thing. Sometimes, the best course of action is just to let it be. This way, you can focus on moving forward without wearing negative or positive tinted glasses.

For example, when something goes wrong, you’ll likely focus on making it better instead of merely letting it float through existence. ‘Good’ and ‘bad’ labels pit your memories against one another, and as someone told me recently: “Comparison is the thief of joy.”

Of course, you can learn a lot from bad memories. But you can also gain wisdom from the good times. Attaching a description designates an emotion, which increases your chances of unreliable narration.

Letting life flourish without a ‘good’ or ‘bad’ tag allows you to focus on what’s important — you.

Life lessons come from everywhere

Avoiding such labels allows you to keep a more open mind and search for lessons from all walks of life.

I’ve learned why emotional detachment from more minor aspects of my career has…

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Published in Forge

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Max Phillips
Max Phillips

Written by Max Phillips

My focus is on the intersectionality of nostalgia | Contact me for any Premium Ghostwriting services -> maxphillipswrites@gmail.com

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